Worldwide web browsing using browsers on mobile devices is becoming increasingly popular. For example, data gathered by NetMarketShare show that the percentage of all browsing performed on mobile devices has steadily risen over the past couple of years (see http://www.netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=61&sample=37&qptimeframe=M&qpsp=136 &qpnp=25). Many popular sites have responded by providing a mobile version of their site optimized for a small screen. However, at least partly due to a weak understanding of energy use by browsers on mobile devices, these mobile sites are often poorly optimized for energy use, causing them to inefficiently consume more of the mobile devices' power than is necessary when rendering such sites in the mobile devices' browsers.
There is a large body of work focusing on energy consumption and network activity in mobile devices. Most results focus on the phone operating system or generic phone applications.
Regarding network traffic for smartphone applications, existing research on mobile devices has provided several proposed approaches to the problem of minimizing energy consumption, such as N. Balasubramanian et al. (N. Balasubramanian, A. Balasubramanian, A. Venkataramani. Energy Consumption in Mobile Phones: A Measurement Study and Implications for Network Applications. In Proc. of ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC'09), Chicago, USA, 2009) which reduces power consumption of data transfers, A. Rahmati et al. (A. Rahmati, L. Zhong. Context-for-Wireless: Context-Sensitive Energy-Efficient Wireless Data Transfer. In Proc. of ACM 5th International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys '07), Puerto Rico, 2007) which chooses wireless interfaces based on network condition estimation, A. Schulman et al. (A. Schulman, V. Navda, R. Ramjee, N. Spring, P. Deshpande, C. Grunewald, K. Jain, V. N. Padmanabhan. Bartendr: A Practical Approach to Energy-aware Cellular Data Scheduling. In Proc. of ACM 16th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom '10), Chicago, USA, 2010) which proposes an approach to energy-aware cellular data scheduling, and S. Nirjon et al. (S. Nirjon, A. Nicoara, C. Hsu, J. Singh, J. Stankovic. MultiNets: Policy Oriented Real-Time Switching of Wireless Interfaces on Mobile Devices. In Proc. of 18th IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS '12), Beijing, China, 2012) and A. Rahmati et al. which dynamically switch between wireless network interfaces based on the data traffic. Several techniques have been used (e.g., bundling multiple transfers as described in N. Balasubramanian et al., switching between WiFi and 3G cellular networks as described in S. Nirjon et al. and A. Rahmati et al., and scheduling based on a dynamic programming procedure for computing the optimal communication schedule as described in A. Schulman et al.) to minimize energy consumption.
Other related measurement works include a study of the performance of 3G network and applications on smartphones, as described in J. Huang et al. (J. Huang, Q. Xu, B. Tiwana, A. Wolman, Z. M. Mao, M. Zhang, P. Bahl. Anatomizing Application Performance Differences on Smartphones. In Proc. of ACM 8th Intl. Conf. on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys '10), San Francisco, USA, 2010) and Z. Zhuang et al. (Z. Zhuang, K. Kim, J. Singh. Improving Energy Efficiency of Location Sensing on Smartphones. In Proc. of ACM 8th Intl. Conf. on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys '10), San Francisco, USA, 2010). J. Huang et al. show that 3G connections suffer from very long latencies and slow data transfers, which may lead to increased energy consumption. Z. Zhuang et al. present a location sensing framework to improve the energy efficiency of localization on smartphones that run multiple location-based applications. The authors present four design principles that minimize energy, i.e., accelerometer-based suppression, location-sensing piggybacking, substitution of location-sensing mechanisms, and adaptation of sensing parameters when battery is low.
Prior works in the context of partitioning applications such as J. Flinn et al. (2002) (J. Flinn, S. Park, M. Satyanarayanan. Balancing Performance, Energy, and Quality in Pervasive Computing. In Proc. of the 22nd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS '02), Vienna, Austria, 2002.), J. Flinn et al. (2001) (J. Flinn, D. Narayanan, M. Satyanarayanan. Self-Tuned Remote Execution for Pervasive Computing. In Proc. of the 8th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS), Germany, 2001), and S. Osman et al. (S. Osman, D. Subhraveti, G. Su, J. Nieh. The Design and Implementation of Zap. In Proc. of the 5th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI '02), Boston, USA, 2002) investigated strategies for reducing the energy consumption of mobile phones by executing code remotely. J. Flinn et al. (2002) and J. Flinn et al. (2001) propose strategies on how to partition a program, how to handle state migration and adaptation of program partitioning scheme to changes in network conditions. S. Osman et al. and B. Chun et al. (Byung-Gon Chun, Petros Maniatis. Augmented Smartphone Applications Through Clone Cloud Execution. In Proc. of the 12th Conference on Hot Topics in Operating Systems, 2009) propose using full process or VM migration to allow remote execution without modifying the application code.
Several previous studies also investigated the use of automatic program partitioning. G. C. Hunt et al. (G. C. Hunt, M. L. Scott. The Coign Automatic Distributed Partitioning System. In Proc. of the 3rd Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI '99), Louisiana, 1999) develop strategies to automatic partitioning of DCOM applications into client and server components without modifying the application source code. Y. Weinsberg et al. (Y. Weinsberg, D. Dolev, T. Anker, M. Ben-Yehuda, P. Wyckoff. Tapping into the Fountain of CPUs—On Operating System Support for Programmable Devices. In Proc. of the 13th International Conf. on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS '08), Seattle, Wash., USA, 2008) propose an approach to offload computation to specialized disk controllers and processors (i.e., NICs).
None of these references mentioned above pertain to the design of energy efficient web pages in the context of mobile web browsing. Thus, there remains a need to provide more guidance to web developers as to how to build energy efficient web pages for mobile browsing.
E. Cuervoy et al. (E. Cuervoy, A. Balasubramanian, D-k. Cho, A. Wolman, S. Saroiu, R. Chandra, P. Bahl. MAUI: Making Smartphones Last Longer with Code Offload. In Proc. of ACM 8th Intl. Conf. on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys '10), San Francisco, USA, 2010) proposed a way to offload heavy computations to a server cloud and have a mobile phone display the results. In the context of web browsing, one could offload image rendering to the cloud and display the results back to the phone. However, while the back-end offloading approach described by Cuervoy et al. works well for certain applications, this approach does not improve browser efficiency.